What did it mean for us to host WooCommerce Conference?

As WooCommerce has grown it has been an incredible journey to see our products used in so many unique ways. What a privilege to know that in some way we’ve helped enable people to ship their ideas (whether macarons, roti-makers or subscription socks).

Somewhere between 10 to 50 employees and a ton of sales we’ve found ourselves in a really fortunate spot with over 5 million votes of confidence in our platform (downloads). We also have dozens of third party developers building products to sell in our marketplace – some of which build, maintain and support WooCommerce products full time. All that to say, we are fortunate to have this massive and growing digital community.

This past year we’ve made a more concerted effort to get out there and speak at WordCamp’s and engage with the community and it has been so encouraging and valuable to meet WooCommerce users. Some of these interactions sparked the idea that it would be incredible to get everyone together to connect around WooCommerce.

There is no shortage of interaction between our team and our users given the thousands of support tickets we field each week in our ever growing support team but there is something special about people getting together (in person) and that will never change.

Hosting our conference meant that we could put faces to names and be part of a dynamic space where all the stakeholders in WooCommerce could come together and share their journeys. It was such a special thing for us to meet some of our partners/sponsors for the first time and see them interact together. To see our team sharing about their roles and hearing from developers first hand about their joys and struggles with developing for WooCommerce. It was refreshing to see so many WooCommerce store owners in attendance, looking for tips and advice on how to take their store to the next level. Read more about it here.

The dust is still settling following the event but there is no doubt it was a huge success with an amazing speaker lineup, some of our closest partners (sponsors), the entire WooThemes team and a group of incredibly diverse attendees from around the globe.

Our hope is that every attendee walked away having made some new connections and a personal connection in some way to WooThemes. We hope attendees feel more confident than ever about developing using WooCommerce and about the future of the platform. We certainly feel like we are part of something bigger and more meaningful. We are more excited than ever to connect WooCommerce users to one another and to help people. We want to create the next wave of products that encourage people to build beautiful things and this is not possible without your help. Do you have a product you’d like to sell? Do you have an idea for a product that will help you with your client project or store? Submit your ideas here.

On that note, we now have a number of WooCommerce meetups going on in the US (Los Angeles and San Francisco, coming soon to Seattle, Denver and Austin) and hope to launch a few in other countries/regions as well. Keep an eye on @WooThemes on Twitter for more info and if there isn’t a WooCommerce Meetup near you, we pick you to start one.